Actually the Viscount does look like a Viscount, I was surprised at the reasonableness of the two fuselage halves fit, not so bad I thought. I put in an extension plug to convert the 700 to an 800 series aircraft. I sawed the fuselage in two at the appropriate point, I jigged then glued the insert then glued the front section of fuselage in the jig to the rear fuselage + extension assembly checked all square and inline, the top and bottom fuselage seams are straight and aligned, the horizontal lines are straight and aligned. So after the glue has set and the jig has been removed, yep everything is inline but why did it look like the nose was skewed to the right? Well bugger me if the right front nose shape is different to the left, OK there is not much in it, probably if it was camouflage painted you wouldnt notice but with an airliner scheme, from the top, to my eyes the fuselage has the symmetry of Dirk Diggler's Donger! Now I have astigmatic vision nothing ever seems straight to me when building models, a ruler is in constant use to check my alignments, you'd think that this thing would look straight to me, but no! Anyway I figured it wasnt that bad I could live with it to have a Viscount in the cabinet, so then I built the wings, hmm not bad I thought...the next bit seemed ok at first, parts of the assembly (engine to wing fairing /firewall/ nacelle) fitted the wing quite nicely and lulled me into a sense that all was right with the world it wasn't until I came to glue the engines onto to the fairing that I noticed how horribly mismatched they were in size and shape and noted that lots of filler would be required here but that was not the worst of it as I glued each engine onto the nacelle it became increasingly evident that even though the fairing to wing and engine fairing joints appeared to be "square" they were not! With the engines glued on at positions at best fit they were all at different angles of incidence and alignment, the bloody engines on the wings looked like a wicket-keepers fingers! Off came all the engines, firewall faces and engine mounts were filed and sanded so that the engines would fit square to the wing. Lots of filler sanding etc and now it looks ok and I thought all was right in the world.. masking painting , masking painting. I took the window masks off and jeez the windscreen panes that are molded into the "clear" part are nothing like the real thing, so now I am am really peed off,I can't live with this, I have to sand the moulded framing off, re do the white paint (at least I can contain that to the cockpit "hump") then create my own framing with masking tape and paint the windscreen panes. Mumble grumble I thought I would finish it tomorrow.
Oh yes I forgot to mention, I had to put a bit of filler to build up the "radar nose" to get it to look right
home designed / made decals for this one:
